Email is not your friend. Email is like your obnoxious neighbor Chad who enjoys playing the bagpipes early Sunday morning. But, worse because on top of being kinda annoying, your email is cleverly disguised as a productivity enhancing super-buddy. It slowly drains you of all your time, focus and output by constantly distracting you with other people’s demands, no matter how ridiculous they may be.

Productivity is no easy feat, and that’s speaking from personal experience. I’m constantly on the go, and despite working my butt off around the clock and even sticking to a solid routine for productivity, I still have that rare day where it’s a bit of a struggle to stay productive.

It starts off harmless. $9 a month to store all my files in the cloud? That’s cool. $20 a month for a virtual phone service? Nice! But before long, you start to get skeptical. “Another subscription service? How many of these do I need?! Not another monthly charge.”

If we all had the opportunity to go back to where we were at just a few years ago, I imagine we would have at least one piece of advice to share with our past selves that would eliminate unnecessary mistakes and wasted time. When you’re in the moment, you don’t really think about how certain actions (or a lack of actions) are really impacting you. Hindsight is always 20/20, though.

One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, I believe, is that we’re all trying to grow our businesses in an age of significant distraction. You carry mobile devices that have you tethered to a network millions of people deep, you’re juggling multiple applications at all hours, and pushing the limits of how many things you can track on a regular basis.

When you’re in charge of a business, you’re all too familiar with that feeling of racing to catch up. But no matter how hard you push or how much you work, you never seem to reach the finish line.

There’s always more marketing to do, more emails to send, another meeting around the corner, more prospects to qualify…

Terminal “behinderness” is an affliction that generates heart-pounding stress and makes you wonder how the most successful founders and leaders manage to be so productive while you feel like you’re constantly drowning.